Radhika Gorur

Dr Gorur is a Senior Lecturer at Deakin University, Australia, and a Director of the Laboratory for International Assessment Studies. Her research seeks to understand how some policy ideas cohere, stabilise, gain momentum, and make their way through the world. Critiquing contemporary practices of quantification and ‘evidence-based policy’ has been central to her research agenda. Using material-semiotic approaches, she has been developing a ‘sociology of measurement and numbers’ that makes explicit the instrumental and constitutive work of quantification and calculation in policy, and elaborates how the ‘character of calculability’ is imposed in specific policy settings.
Dr Gorur has 25 years of experience as a teacher and has held positions of leadership in schools in Nigeria, Oman, India and Australia. She holds a Master’s degree in Curriculum and Teaching from Michigan State University and was awarded a PhD in education from the University of Melbourne in 2011. Dr Gorur has previously held research fellowships at the University of Melbourne and Victoria University. She has been an invited speaker or panelist at various institutions, including Harvard University; Columbia University; the Institute of Education, London; Ruhr University; Western University, Canada; and the University of Melbourne. She has been a visiting researcher at the RAND Corporation and Ruhr University. She received Victoria University’s Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Research (Early Career) in 2014, and the CRN Outstanding Early Career Researcher Award in 2015.